A Template for Teaching 21st Century Technologies of the Self

Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, 1994

's later work concentrates on the constitution of the subject in ethics. His interest is not in a code-oriented morality, such as he believes Christianity to be, for then according to Foucault, subjectivation would occur in an almost juridical fashion, in which the subject would refer his conduct to a law or code of rules to which he would have to submit. Tbe notion of morality as disobedience to a code of roles has, for Foucault, disappeared. Given this absence of morality, an "aesthetics of existence" is proposed, for which areturn to the Greeks provides a paradigm in the search for the beautiful existence. If Foucault is, however, interested in Antiquity, it is not to propose the Greeks as an alternative to our present problem, but rather to see how Greco-Roman ethics can shed light on the problem of our present and of our present selves. According to Foucault, Greek ethics is not essentially concemed with religious problems, nor is it related to any legal institutional system; for the Greeks ethics is, rather, linked to the will to live a beautiful life. And so, Foucault classifies the problem of our present as one in which the arts of individual existence have to be renewed. An ethics grounded in aesthetics seems to provide for Foucault an answer to the present absence of morality and to the very grounding of morality. In speaking of the present foundation, or lack of foundation, for ethics, Foucault says: I wonder if our problem nowadays is not, in a way, similar to this one, since most of us no longer believe that ethics is founded in religion, nor do we want a legal system to intervene in our moral, personal, private Iife. Recent liberation movements suffer from the fact that they cannot fmd any principle on which to base the elaboration of a newethics. They need an ethics, but they cannot find any other ethics than an ethics founded on so-caUed scientific knowlcdge of what the self is, what desire is, what the unconscious is, and so on. I am struck by Ibis similarity of problems.' Now what I wish to show briefly in this paper is that Foucault's postmodern ethics is essentially an outgrowth of the Greeks' "care of the self,"a reaction against Christianity, and a continuation of Descartes' sharp

Psychological essentialism-adherence to view that individuals possess specifically mental processes or mechanisms-has long served as a pivotal feature of the Western cultural tradition. Already in Aristotelian philosophy there was an elaborate formulation of the workings of mental life. Platonic theory of knowledge, and its central concern with the reality of pure ideas, was also forged from a preliminary belief in the preeminence of the psychological interior. Such offerings from the Greek cultural world, when coupled with the Judaeo-Christian conception of the soul, lent a solid palpability to the presumption of an inner world-identifiable, ever present, transparent and central to the understanding of human action. As variously elaborated over the centuries, such early speculations have undergone significant change. As medievalists such as Augustine and Aquinas and expanded on the concepts of soul, sensation, and the emotions; as rationalist philosophers such as Descartes and Kant extolled the capacities of pure reason and a priori ideas; as empiricist philosophers such as Locke and Hobbes emphasized the significance of experience in the generation of ideas; and romanticist poets, novelists, and philosophers explored the mysterious terrain of the passions, creative urges, evil inclinations, genius and madness, so have we become a tradition in which the presumption of an inner life-as real and possibly more important than the external, material world-has become firmly fixed. The discourse of the individual interior has also provided the major rationale for many of our central institutions. Religious institutions have long been devoted to educating and purifying the soul. Educational institutions are dedicated to the enhancement of individual mental functioning, families are centrally concerned with building the character of the young, democratic institutions are founded on the belief in independent judgment, and courts of law could scarcely operate without the concepts of intention, memory, and conscious knowledge firmly in place. Placed in this light, we also find that one of the major effects of 20th century social science is the objectification of the psychological world. Whereas philosophers, priests, and poets of previous centuries were largely confined to a rhetoric of symbols-of written and spoken language-the social sciences were (and continue to be) additionally armed with a rhetoric of observation. That is, the social sciences-derived as they are from the combined logics of rationalist and empiricist philosophy-promised, at last, to ground theoretical speculation in the observable world. Whether it be in the introspective methods of the early mentalist psychologists, the experimental methods of the laboratory psychologist, the phenomenological methods

2011

This dissertation is, first, an examination of the coherence and consistency of Michel Foucault’s work with respect to its development and an examination of his ethos, a product of conscious self-construction. Second, this work is an exploration of ethical techniques. The goal of the dissertation is to discover an ethos that takes into account the best contemporary critical attitudes and techniques of ethical self-construction. The first chapter begins with a discussion of the development of Foucault’s archaeological method. Discussion of some problems with structuralism, his genealogical method, and finally his movement towards an ethical program follows. The method for the dissertation will be exploratory and critical. The second chapter develops a line of thinking about the development of freedom in Kant and Foucault. Power relations are a persistent context in which self-construction takes place. Resistance to power relations marks the beginning of freedom, which requires testing and moving beyond the limits of socially constructed selves. The Quakers display a model of structured resistance to enclosing authorities. John Woolman provides an example of ethical self-construction. The third chapter explores Foucault’s ethical project by examining ancient Greco-Roman and Christian technologies of the self, and relates those projects to ethical selfconstruction through writing. This exploration shows continuity in the product of writing from Ancient through modern writers. The fourth chapter develops a postmodern ethos through an examination of weak ontology. James Rachels’ ethical programme is a model for a postmodern technology of the self. The resulting technique offered provides a vulnerability to facticity while retaining the best ethical principles and critical reasoning. This is illustrated in Miroslav Volf’s The End of Memory. Foucault’s ethos is a clear precursor to modern technologies of the self that take the exploration of knowledge with humility into account.

Dialogue and Universalism vol.27, no.3, 2017

ABSTRACT: The ethical constitution of the subject in Michel Foucault's work relies on the way truth is perceived, and on the way the knowledge of truth is produced. Foucault understands subjectivity as constituted socio-historically by means of particular techniques, which he refers to as " Technologies of the Self. " The main focus of this paper is to present the way in which two different kinds of approaching the truth, the modern scientific and the ancient Greek one, develop different kinds of technologies as ways of forming the subjectivity. It is maintained that the ancient technology of the care of the self can be especially meaningful in contemporary society from an ethical and political perspective.

Studia Philosophica et Theologica, 2022

This paper aims to present the relevance of Foucault's technology of the self to face the future of the post-coronavirus world. The significance of Foucault technology of the self lies in the practice of self-forming where the pandemic era has urged humans to evaluate their subjectivity. It is because the subject is faced with the external challenge of the biopolitics of the state as well as internal challenge of the Subject's future anxiety. Hence, this study tries to respond to these problems by analyzing Foucault's technology of the self which was inspired by the ancient practice of the care of the self to practice selfexamination in order to achieve self-mastery. In compiling this paper, the author applied a qualitative methodology through which descriptive, textual, and contextual analyses are applied to written materials related to the subject matter. By developing self-mastery techniques, Foucault presupposes the individual to be a critical and reflective subject who will actively respond to biopolitics as well as his future anxiety.

Routledge International Handbook for Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity and Technology, 2023

Our ever-increasing reliance on technology often brings anxiety about the right way to incorporate it into our daily lives. Drawing on Plato’s Alcibiades, Michel Foucault offers us a fresh way to approach modern technology through his understanding of a proper care of self. At the advent of modernity, however, Foucault argues that this historic “care of self” becomes reduced to a “knowledge of self.” The reduction of care of self is based on a narrow view of subjectivity, where the human is characterized solely as an acquirer of knowledge. In this paper, I will first describe Foucault’s ideas of technologies of self and care of self in order to illustrate a full notion of subjectivity. Next, I will demonstrate how the modern reduction of care of self to knowledge of self exposes many of the weaknesses found in modern technology. Third, I will consider examples of modern technology such as geography blogs, digital books, smart watches and prayer apps and argue that a full care of self helps us distinguish between harmful and healing technologies of self.

This paper explores the similarities in philosophy and practice between democratic school meetings as a technology of the self and the discussion of the technologies of ‘care of the self’ as an ethical practice outlined by Michel Foucault (Foucault 1986). It is suggested that an appreciation of the similarities between these two important projects might offer an educational focus on a practical positivity for life lived, that Foucault himself considered missing ‘at least from the humanistic period of the Renaissance til now...’ and which might serve humanity in a useful way.

2017

Self-modification is an ancient human practice; however, for the first time in history, technology is enabling us to modify our lives not only at an existential or experiential level, but also at an informational level. This paper discusses Foucault’s concept of “technologies of the self” as well as some of its recent interpretations within contemporary philosophy of technology. It shows how ICTs have opened new dimensions for humans to transform their bodies, minds, and self-conception. It argues that while ‘traditional’ self-modification is being revolutionised and popularised by ICTs, these systems are also exposing us to potent, and unintentional forms of ontological tinkering. Ultimately, this paper shows how Foucault’s concept can serve as a valuable tool for understanding contemporary human-technology relations.